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Exxon spent millions of dollars researching the problem. It outfitted an oil tanker, the Esso Atlantic, with CO2<\/sub> <\/span>detectors to measure how fast the oceans could absorb excess carbon, and hired mathematicians to build sophisticated climate models. By 1982, they had concluded that even the company\u2019s earlier estimates were probably too low. In a private corporate primer, they wrote that heading off global warming and \u201cpotentially catastrophic events\u201d would \u201crequire major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.\u201d<\/p>\nAn investigation by the L.A. <\/span>Times<\/i> <\/span>revealed that Exxon executives took these warnings seriously. Ken Croasdale, a senior researcher for the company\u2019s Canadian subsidiary, led a team that investigated the positive and negative effects of warming on Exxon\u2019s Arctic operations. In 1991, he found that greenhouse gases were rising due to the burning of fossil fuels. \u201cNobody disputes this fact,\u201d he said. The following year, he wrote that \u201cglobal warming can only help lower exploration and development costs\u201d in the Beaufort Sea. Drilling season in the Arctic, he correctly predicted, would increase from two months to as many as five months. At the same time, he said, the rise in the sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger waves that would damage offshore drilling structures. Thawing permafrost could make the earth buckle and slide under buildings and pipelines. As a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated rises in sea level.<\/p>\ns journalists at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles <\/span>Times<\/i>have revealed since 2015, Exxon, the world\u2019s largest oil company, understood that its product was contributing to climate change a decade before Hansen testified. In July, 1977, James F. Black, one of Exxon\u2019s senior scientists, addressed many of the company\u2019s top leaders in New York, explaining the earliest research on the greenhouse effect. \u201cThere is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon-dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,\u201d he said, according to a written version of the speech which was later recorded, and which was obtained by InsideClimate News. In <\/span>1978, speaking to the company\u2019s executives, Black estimated that a doubling of the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by between two and three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as ten degrees Celsius (eighteen degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles.<\/p>\n
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